High energy photons excited photodynamic cancer therapy in vitro

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is a noninvasive phototherapy method that has been clinically approved for many years. During this type of therapy, the photosensitizing agent will be excited by optical photons to generate reactive oxygen species which can kill nearby cancer cells. However, due to the strong optical scattering and absorption of tissue, optical photons can only penetrate tissues in few millimeters which result in the limited applications of PDT to superficial lesions like skin cancers. In this study, to overcome the penetration limitations, we used high-energy photons to excite photosensitizers directly by assuming that high-energy photons generate low-energy optical photons in tissues to excite photosensitizers. Cesium- 137 irradiator has been used as the high-energy photon source. A fiber pigtailed diode laser was used to validate the photosensitizer’s efficacy. We used MPPa as the photosensitizer to treat A549 cancer cell line with different concentrations of drug (10μM/ ml, 5 μM/ml, 2.5 μM/ml, 1 μM/ml and 0 μM/ml). We have performed an irradiation experiment for different time durations of 30 min, 15 min, 7 min to 3 min, respectively, and we also compared different drug concentrations and different exposure durations. Our study not only proved the MPPa PDT method was effective, but also indicated that high-energy photons enhanced PDT could potentially overcome the penetration limitations thus making PDT feasible for deep tissue cancer.